Why You Need a CDN for your WordPress Blog? [Infographic]

We are getting tons of requests for a detailed tutorial on how to speed up your WordPress blog. In the past presentations, we have stressed a whole lot about CDN, but it still seems that we don’t clarify ourselves enough. Many beginners still don’t understand what CDN is because we are constantly asked with the question, “Would I still need hosting if I get a CDN?”. This is partially our fault for not making things clear. It was brought to our attention that every time we have written about CDN, we always ignore the basics. So in this article, we will make an attempt to explain what is a CDN, and why you need a CDN for your WordPress blog.

Update: Just to clarify, CDN is something you use on top of having a web hosting account because it helps speed up things. CDN does not replace a web hosting account. You still need to have a hosting provider like SiteGround, Bluehost, etc.

Infographic

What is a CDN?

CDN is short for Content Delivery Network which is a network of servers that deliver cached static content from websites to users based on the geographic location of the user. Pretty confusing eh? Let’s break it down in simpler words.

Normally when a user comes to your WordPress blog, they are redirected to your web host’s server (i.e HostGator). Your web host’s server is located at a central location i.e Houston, TX. So every user on your website is accessing this one server to view your website. Now if you have high volume of traffic, then you can overload your server which leads to a slow loading site or even server crash. This is where a CDN comes in handy because it is a network of servers, but most importantly these servers are spread through out the world. When you use a CDN, your static content is cached and stored on all of these servers. Static content includes images, stylesheets (css files), javascripts, Flash, etc. Now when a user visits your site (original server), the CDN technology redirects them to the closest server to their location.

For example: If your main server is hosted in Houston, TX, and someone from Durham, England tries to access it, then they will be redirected to the closest server which may be in London. This limits the number of internet hops needed to transmit the static files to your end user.

User’s proximity to your web server has an impact on load time. By deploying your content across multiple geographically dispersed servers, you can make your pages load faster from the user’s perspective. This is when CDN comes in handy. In simple words, the closer the CDN server is to where your user is, the faster the user gets the content.

Why you need a CDN for your WordPress Blog?

If you read the above section, then you can clearly see that having a CDN can make a huge impact on your website. Below are some of the advantages that we have seen on our site by using a CDN:

Speed – Once we started using a CDN on our site, the site got faster.

Crash Resistance – Thanks to you guys for sharing our articles, we have received huge spells of traffic from social media on some of our articles. If it wasn’t for the proper CDN and caching setup, then our site would crash so many times. CDN allows us to distribute the load to multiple servers instead of having 100% traffic to our main server thus making it less likely to crash.

Improved User Experience – Since we started using a CDN, we have noticed a decline in bounce rate on our site. Furthermore, we have also seen increased in pageviews and numbers of pages viewed by each user. So clearly a fast site means improved user experience.

Improvement in SEO – Google has clearly stated that faster sites tend to rank higher in Search Engines. We have noticed our site ranking higher once we did the optimization on our site.

We are using MaxCDN on our site, and they are amazing. We have met the folks from MaxCDN in person, and they are really great at support as well. You can also get 25% OFF your MaxCDN purchase if you use the coupon code: “wpbeginner“. For more coupons, check out WPBeginner WordPress Coupons.

Page loading is mandatory for any website, and it is now an official search engine ranking factor, and if your pages are not loading less than 3 seconds, you need to work on it right away.

Although websites used to rely on a single server for presenting all the content, and CDN services have improved the scenario forever. By using a reputable CDN service, you can make sure that the readers are experiencing a faster page loading speed plus a better-performing website. It is possible to use the primary CDN service for free in private blogs or simplistic websites. But, if you want to improve security components, you have to go for the value added packages.

Thanks for sharing the information, I am using CDN on my recently started WordPress powered website; now my website is really fast loading after CDN integration, but your post encourages me to think more about premium features that are required for security concerns.

Thank you for clarifying the purpose of a CDN. A very straightforward and easy to understand explanation. wpbeginner is a great resource and I’m starting to appreciate your value to the WordPress community!

Thanks for interesting post.
If I understand it correctly CDN is useful for websites with international orientation, but not for websites with a national user base. I am located in the Netherlands (small country), and my website is focusing on people in the Netherlands. Am I correct that CDN is not going to improve loading speed for my customers?

hey..i wanna use cloudflare..
but they require to changes nameservers..will it cause any problems to d original hosting if i point domain nameserver details to cloudflare, n not to hostgator? or it will just work out automatically..? i m using wordpress 4.4.2 btw..plz reply..i need ur help!

Can I increase Default Cache Time to 12 month in MaxCDN? As the images, css, js that I have will never change. Yes I may add more images as I add more posts. But existing ones will be same as usual forever.

To WPBeginner: “Why You Need a CDN for your WordPress Blog” is not a question and should not have a question mark. “What the heck is a CDN” is a question and should have a question mark. Nit-picky? Maybe, but mistakes like this are jarring to some of us, and detract from the value of your content.

How much total bandwidth would you recommend to purchase? Where could I find out how much bandwidth we go through on a regular basis. I mean traffic wise I’m sure it depends on location of users. So as a company that may see 100,000 page views/50k visitors or more a month is 100GB of bandwidth enough?

I would recommend going with high quality hosting with your own static IP address and reliable hosting/page refresh rates before using CDN.

It’s my understanding that Google ranks sites based on their geographic targeting. Google seems to be focused on providing the best rankings for the smaller businesses in their local markets. This also improves Google’s advertising revenue by having many more sites competing for the same category advertising keywords.

Larger companies are able to have multiple websites in multiple geographical locations and can more easily globally dominate ranking categories.

I just wanted to add one note… CDNs don’t only accelerate the delivery of static content, but also dynamic content (any content generated in real time by the origin server— e.g. applications) as well. Dynamic content is not cachable, but CDNs can speed up the request and returns from the server through a series of proxy servers/nodes strategically placed around the world… basically creating a more direct route for the data packets to travel through. Traditional internet protocols require that data packets travel through more connecting points, which delays the arrival of data packets… making it slower to load on the client.

Not sure this is right. I’ve conducted tests with every major CDN out there, and in all cases it’s significantly slower accessing uncacheable dynamic pages rather than just going to the origin server directly.

However, it is true that dynamic pages can too benefit from a CDN. The key is to use a CDN that allows almost instant purging, so you have it cache everything and then your application can send a ‘purge’ request to the CDN when it knows an update has occurred (e.g. new post or comment). Of course, this requires specific integration.

Actually, if the majority of the page is loaded via CDN content, and the dynamic part of the page is loaded via AJAX, a CDN could considerably increase the speed of a true dynamic page. Obviously, after the page is loaded, a CDN would not help increase the speed of the next AJAX load. But to an uninformed user, the feel of the website would be generally quicker with a CDN than without a CDN.

We will probably do a comparison in some article. However, we would still recommend MaxCDN. Installing jetpack in self-hosted WordPress requires you to connect your WordPress site to WordPress.com and many users don’t want to do that. Also Photon just serves images it calls itself image acceleration and editing service, not a CDN.

Hi, can you tell me if the servers all over the globe have static pages and you update a static page, how long does it take for the servers to update that page? Can you force and update of static pages, and how do you do that? Thanks

I can see this blog entry is a few months old now, however I have just completed building a site on Wix and its sole purpose is e-commerce hopefully on a global scale. Problem is however we have noticed for a while that the website was sluggish during building and still is after going premium and adding more bandwidth. Can MaxCDN solve our problems? Wix only ever gives out canned responses such as “you must compress images” and “please disable the auto rotate function from your slideshow” this is aggravating to say the least. this is the website in question

would be really grateful for your thoughts and assistance i’ve spoke to MaxCDN and they said they can help, however you never know whether its a sales pitch?

I have created a few sites using Wix, including my own portfolio site. I offer it to clients who want a very simple site with few updates that is cheap. I plan on moving my own site to WordPress. After learning to create in WP, although with each theme it’s like having to relearn how that specific theme operates, I highly recommend WordPress and find it to be my preferred platform to develop websites from.

@kath.gamboa First of all the idea is that CDN service will not go down because they have so many datacenters across the globe. But lets imagine the worst and say that if it does go down, then all you have to do is go into your W3 Total Cache plugin, and turn off CDN for that time. All of your content will then be served directly from your server.

Remember, you never upload any content directly to the CDN servers. You always upload it to your web hosting server, and CDN simply mirrors it.

Okay how does it work. I am with hostgaor. I want faster page loads etc. I personally live in Australia. So there is is delay because of that huge big distance the information has to travel. Okay for someone who lives next to the server in the USA, but not ideal for here in OZ.

1. Does MaxCDN have a server here in Australia?

2. What about Amazon S3, do they have a server in Australia?

3. Does anyone?

4. Does the CDN have copies off everything that is on my website. So like the HTML files as well? If so, maybe a work around for me would be to get a web host based here in Australia. This will allow fast loading here, then use the CDN for the rest of the world.

5. So I guess, if I am browsing from the England, will it pull everything from the England server, and nothing from the hostgator server back in the US??

[email protected]?I think yes,its der In sydney or its being planned.. See here,?http://www.kaisercentergarage.com/features/network/ ?.. I would recommend MaxCDN because they charge on pay-as-you go basis i.e as $ 40 per 1TB of data… Amazon is costly. It mirrors the whole website and creates cache or the websites so in the event that the server is down,the website doesnt go offline.. I personally use it for my http://www.kaisercentergarage.com

[email protected]?Actually,the best part of MaxCDN is that it doent matter how big or small your website is, It has a wonderful pay-as-you go plan where you have to renew only when you are done using the 1 TB you bought.. So if the 1 Tb doesnt get used up even after 2 years, its fine,the plan will go on…?

WP-Super Cache is a bit simpler to use that W3 Total Cache and has a tab to configure Origin-Pull CDNs. Otherwise, you can use another plugin in conjunction for Push CDNs but I would recommend Origin-Pull be a requirement of the CDN you go with.

Improved User Experience – Since we started using a CDN, we have noticed a decline in bounce rate on our site. Furthermore, we have also seen increased in pageviews and numbers of pages viewed by each user. So clearly a fast site means improved user experience.

Improvement in SEO – Google has clearly stated that faster sites tend to rank higher in Search Engines. We have noticed our site ranking higher once we did the optimization on our site.

Something more, like how your counce rate and pageviews changed ?

SEO in Google, how fast can you see something changes, by traffic monitoring or how come ?

When we optimized our site for speed, the site went about 240% faster. We saw a huge decline in bounce rate as people were not just exiting on the first page. They were going to other pages as well which means increase in pageviews. Clearly the user experience must have been improved by the faster site. Because we did not change the placement of related links or anything. Those were there before and after.

In terms of google, it has been stated that the faster your site is, the more pages will get indexed per day.

After implemnting some CDN to my couple of WordPress websites, what i mean implement, delete old cache systems on those sites and installed W3 Total Cache plugins.

I setup evrything as it should be and go to sleep.

Now from this morning i have big problems with my VPS server.

Don’t know what is going on but my CPU is from time to time (short period of time) goes like 100% , memory is bigger & bigger, swap is starting to work… tasks are going from normal about 60 to 100 or even more.

Anyway i am fighting with this one almost 10 hours without sucess. I reboot server, soft&hard and make many stuff but nothing seems to work.

In past server was not doing nothing almost , now it is extreme busy.

I think this is too much for me and i need to find WordPress+Linux pro who will help me with that problem.

Hmm. Still haven’t received an activation email. I did receive an email asking how I like the service – replied to that saying I’m still not setup, and haven’t heard anything back. I’m starting to think I made a mistake signing up with MaxCDN. I’ve sent 2 more emails, and tried to text chat, but that timed out and I got a ‘send an email’ message.

No matter how big your site is, CDN will almost always speed up the site. However, keeping server load down is not something that new sites have to worry about, so in that aspect (You don’t need it). But in other aspects, CDN will help you. We never launch any site without utilizing CDN from Day 1.

Hi,
thanks for suggestion and for coupon, i have signed yesterday and i’m trying maxcdn+w3totalcache on my site. I have only a problem with w3totalcache, it doesn’t rewrite all url added in custom files list,so i get 87 for pagespeed and only 64(D) for Yslow.

Gigi, are you adding the urls in the custom-files the right way? We are doing a lot of images and files via that, and it works out great. Let us know exactly what the issue is, perhaps paste a screenshot, and we would be able to help.

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